JUMOK Dance Theater "YARAS"

17.02.2024 / 20h00 @Le140, Brussels

*Tickets, click here

"YARAS" is a work about trans-humanism and gender bending. It challenges the concepts of genetic inheritance, technologically enhanced bodies versus anatomical defects/originalities. On stage, nine dancers transform their own body shapes and physical movements by absorbing and uncannily harmonising with various, anomalous objects. The artists incarnate the “Yaras”, a fictional community in which each member of the race is interpreted with a different colour and character. Their society lingers in a pattern of repeated cycles of ecstasy and lethargy and the key to understanding this mystifying civilization seems to lie in symbolic images, actions and geometrically coded movements.

The Yaras are complex beings with a duality of freedom and control, open but rational, empathic yet cold and egocentric. As we discover their society we witness physical conversations leading to collisions and conflicts. The Yaras have twisted, deformed and extended bodies which allow them to move in a seemingly inhuman manner, creating a visually unique world. Dramaturgically, the piece is given a further notion of quirkiness and vitality through the robotic, futuristic objects which inhabit the scenery (cyber dogs, cyber birds etc.)

This modern dance piece is an intersection between two existential questions; posthumanism and gender equality. It presents a viewpoint of the invisible wall between men and women and questions how to dismantle the same. Simultaneously it presents an interrogation of where the line between humans and robots become blurred or even erased. The use of future-oriented objects in this piece hints on the possible disappearance of humankind altogether. However, as the mystical drama unfurls the audience will witness how an equilibrium is formed between different identities and how different ideologies can be forged into one belief, leaving us with a ray of hope for a future world in balance with technology, nature and mankind.

Choreographer

Hun Mok Jung is actively working on choreography based on his international sense that he has built through long overseas activities. Fifteen years of experience as a co-creator and dancer at Peeping Tom, Belgium, a world-class dance company, was a great stepping stone to strengthening artistic capabilities as a choreographer.

The dance film "URAGANO," released at the 2021 international solo dance festival "MONOTANZ SEOUL," has achieved great results worldwide, including Montreal, Hollywood, Tokyo, Berlin, and Seoul, and in 2022, the world of JUMOK Dance Theater was expanded by introducing "ANON," a work selected for the Seoul Arts Foundation's art creation support project. In the work <ANON>, he gained a lot of attention as a choreographer after gaining a reputation for unraveling human dignity, different beliefs, and walls of reality in an original choreography style. 

The new work <Yaras> contains artificial intelligence and future anthropological discourse implied in the previous <ANON>. The combination of various cybernetic materials and timeless objects reveals the threshed human body on the stage, experiments the limitations of possibility, and describes the distorted appearance of mankind, and concerns about why "humanism" should exist in the future society.

-Credit

Choreographer: Hunmok Jung

Stage designer: Ll Kyoung Jo

Light designer: Jaeeok Kim

Sound edit: Ju Won Seo

Stage manager: In-sung Kim

Producer: Sin Ae Park

Assistant PD: Heeji Seo

Dancers: Mijeong Kwon, Minuk Choi, Somi Bae, Dajeong Yu, Seungkwan Yang, Myungin Yoon , Jiyoon Lee, Jin Wook Han, Jeong Bin Seo